It's a dash of celebrity amidst Martin's black-and-white documentary photography of unknown folks populating the old, weird America. He photographs a road cutting through a snowy rolling Vermont mountain valley, as seen through the frosted windshield of a bus, or children crowding around a car under the spray of a fire hydrant opened up on a summer Brooklyn street. These are iconic, radiant moments.

Some of the photos are more interesting for what they are than how they're shot — like images of Halloween on San Francisco's Castro Street in the '80s. But then there are tender images like one of an old woman on her back her nursing home bed, with her scrawny bare legs raised into the air. It speaks of the struggles and humiliations of getting old.

Martin photographs the boarded-up Tummyville USA ice cream parlor and a sign featuring Abe Lincoln atop the crappy Lincoln Motel in New Jersey. A photo shows a young woman sipping from a paper Coke cup sitting on a shoeshine stand in a dingy hallway before a mural depicting the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Martin seems to be asking "what is America?" as he photographs the intersection of our ideals and economics, where democracy sometimes is embodied in the fact that — as Warhol once noted — no matter who we are, we all get the same can of Coke.

Ghost stories For all of the excitement that surrounded Wilco on the Maine State Pier or Sufjan Stevens at Port City Music Hall or the various sold-out Ray LaMontagne shows of the past year, there is no question that last Sunday's Phish show at the Cumberland County Civic Center was the biggest thing to hit our fair city in a very long time.

Wanting more After its triumphant traversal of the complete Béla Bartók string quartets at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Borromeo Quartet was back for a free 20th- and 21st-century program at Jordan Hall, leading off with an accomplished recent piece by the 24-year-old Egyptian composer Mohammed Fairuz, Lamentation and Satire.

2009: The year in dance You could say there were two tremendous forces that propelled dance into the world of modern culture: the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev and the choreography of Merce Cunningham.

Hearts and souls (and laughs too) It's been a good year for theater around here — an ingeniously roasted dramatic chestnut here, a new and safely landed flight of fancy there. Below are 10 productions that particularly stood out.

Big starts I kick off my highlights of 2009 with praise for a theater company that has just finished its inaugural season: The Legacy Theater Company, founded by former City Theater artistic director Steve Burnette.

Beyond Dilla and Dipset With a semi-sober face I'll claim that hip-hop in 2010 might deliver more than just posthumous Dilla discs, Dipset mixtapes, and a new ignoramus coke rapper whom critics pretend rhymes in triple-entendres.